Excuse Us While We Kiss The Sky

It was almost dawn, and we rappelled down the way we'd come, scaling the fences and dropping back out to the street. When we returned to the car, Explo asked Helen for his car keys. She was quite certain she had given them to him. He was quite certain she hadn't. Frantic searching of bags commenced as the sky lightened. Finally Explo ran back, scaling the fences again to hunt for the keys where they had fallen from Helen's pocket and off the roof of the cathedral. Small miracle, he found them.

We pulled over at a truck stop on the outskirts of Paris, standing in line behind the bleary-eyed and glum denizens of the morning shift. Helen surveyed the scene in dismay. "None of those people know where we were two hours ago. You're just back to normal life, and it sucks."

···

Returning to London, we found Garrett trying to bring some order to the chaos that had spun out of his life. He had gotten his door replaced, though it would likely be months before the socialist bureaucracy got around to compensating him for it. But his fate was far from clear. Since he couldn't leave the UK, he would likely have to cancel a talk he was scheduled to give for Google in Arizona (topic: "Exploring the World Around Us"), and his job with Oxford might be threatened by his tenuous legal status. For all he knew, he'd be deported after his court hearing in a few months. But his spirit, to all outward appearances, was unflagging.

Garrett wanted to show me one final site, the gargantuan Art Deco hulk of the Battersea Power Station, with its four chimneys reaching 340 feet. Battersea is the iconic structure on the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals, a great ruined dinosaur skeleton of industrial civilization. It's been derelict since the early '80s and the subject of an endless string of redevelopment boondoggles. Most recently it had served as a parking lot for hundreds of police vehicles during the Olympics.

Waiting for a security patrol to roll by, we squeezed through a hole in the fence, sprinted across a weedy no-man's-land, and clambered up stairwells through the pigeon-flapping blackness. The power station's control room was the size of a basketball court, a steampunk fever dream of endless dials and switches and levers, like an analog nerve center for the city-of-tomorrow of yesteryear. The sense of touching unsanitized history, of being able to measure time in the accumulation of dust, was enormously powerful. Garrett threw levers back and forth, flipping dead switches in some sort of Dr. Who fantasy. "This is what they won't let you do in museums," he said.

We climbed higher and emerged into the rainy night, onto the scaffolding surrounding one of the chimneys, and scaled it to its top, halfway up the southwest stack, which was big enough to swallow a double-decker bus. A wavering reflection of London slid by on the surface of the Thames several hundred feet below, and trains maneuvered by at tilt-shift scale. The city looked like a misty diorama.

But an explorer can never rest, least of all Bradley L. Garrett, Ph.D. "Everyone's bored here, everything's been done," he said, fretting that all London's mysteries had been plucked. "We're just sort of waiting for the next big thing."

People tend to age out of Urbex, get respectable and lose the spark of curiosity that called them to explore in the first place. There are very few people who keep exploring after 40, he told me. He hoped he could avoid that fate. He looked forward to the twenty-mile Super-Sewer project, scheduled to be finished by 2025, and the Crossrail tunnel being dug beneath London. And even if he were deported, banished from this island that had offered him such incomparable visions, there were always other options, other places. He'd heard of a secret Soviet subway system beneath Moscow. And the colossal sewers of Tokyo. And the Second Avenue subway line being dug beneath Manhattan. He had always fantasized about piloting a tunnel-boring machine. The world was full of hidden possibilities.